1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a settlement intermediation processing apparatus relating to commerce via the Internet such as on-line shopping, a storage medium in which a program for settlement intermediation processing is sotred, a computer program for settlement intermediation, an on-line shop apparatus, an on-line shopping method, and an on-line shopping system.
2. Description of the Prior Art
FIG. 36 shows a flow of conventional on-line shopping.
A registered member (user) of one on-line mall accesses the homepage of the mall where a navigation page usually exists. The navigation page is linked to the homepages of the respective member shops.
If the user orders a commodity on the homepage of one of the member shops (indicated by symbol (1)), order data is sent to the member shop (indicated by symbol (2)). The member shop generates a slip and communicates it to a mall-operating company as a virtual mall developer (indicated by symbol (3)).
The mall-operating company sends a confirmation mail message to the member to confirm that the member made the buying order (indicated by symbol (4)). If the member sends a buying confirmation signal (indicated by symbol (5)), a credit card number that is correlated with the ID and the password of the member and stored in a server of the mall-operating company is input to a settlement system of a settlement institution and communicated to a card company via this system. Authorization processing is performed in the card company (indicated by symbol
If authorization is made, an authorization result is sent back to the mall-operating company (indicated by symbol (6)) and then communicated to the member and the member shop as an authorization result (indicated by symbol (7)) and a sale approval notice (indicated by symbol (8)), respectively.
The member shop sends the commodity to the member (indicated by symbol (9)) and performs sale decision processing (indicated by symbol (10)) by uploading sales data to the server of the mall-operating company. The mall-operating company collects sales data that are input from the respective member shops and inputs those to the settlement system of the settlement institution (indicated by symbol (11)).
Based on the sales data, the settlement system passes credit data to respective card companies. Each card company charges members commodity prices (indicated by symbol (12)) and passes the commodity prices to the mall-operating company via the settlement system (indicated by symbol (11)).
With the above processing, sales prices are paid to the member shops and fund settlement is performed (indicated by symbol (13)).
Incidentally, in conventional electronic commerce systems of the above kind, on-line shops and malls independently employ various kinds of settling procedures. An ID and a password that are issued in a certain mall are available for only that mall. Therefore, a user who wants to use various on-line shops and malls need to have himself registered by inputting personal information, a card number, etc. many times for a number of shops and malls.
This results in problems that registration procedures are cumbersome and a number of IDs and passwords need to be managed.
There is another problem that, repeatedly following such registration procedures, many times increases the possibility of leakage of card information.